


hell don't want you and heaven is full

by Ahigheroctave



Category: Greek and Roman Mythology, Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Pomegranates, Story within a Story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-08
Updated: 2013-07-08
Packaged: 2017-12-18 03:29:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/875100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ahigheroctave/pseuds/Ahigheroctave
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Storybrooke AU. A ray of light doesn't belong to the darkness. (Or how Hook and Aurora misremember the story of Persephone.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	hell don't want you and heaven is full

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place in an Alternative Universe where Aurora, Mulan, Philip, and Hook were all taken from the Enchanted Forest/Neverland as part of Regina's curse. In regards to canon's timeline, it would take place after Emma had returned to town and allowed time to start moving normally again, but slightly before she's broken the curse and restored the memories of the enchanted folks. Kieran-Killian, Lucy-Aurora, Peyton-Mulan, Charles-Philip.

They’re lying on a blanket in the cemetery, just beyond the giant vault belonging to Mayor Mills’ family. April has just begun and the unpredictable Maine weather had not been kind to them this year, drudging up more snow and hail in the past few weeks than Kieran could remember any year before. It seemed that things had been changing a lot lately, though no-one could seem to say why. Even though the air was particularly balmy that Tuesday, they had straggled around a bit to find a clear spot in the grass. Most of the cemetery was still covered in wet, molding leaves or melting patches of snow. Coupled with the spooky quality created by the crumbing graves and general aura of isolation, the place did not leave much to be desired. It was the type of place Lucy would have normally avoided at all costs.

However, most nights her roommate, Peyton, didn’t come waltzing in with Charlie, her ex-boyfriend, to watch the Walking Dead after their kickboxing class. And it definitely had never before resulted in the pair finding her horizontal on the couch with the town’s number one undesirable. It had been just about all she could do not to die of embarrassment.

Needless to say, getting out of their shoebox-sized apartment had been necessary.

“That one,” She pointed to a row of stars. She vaguely remembered it from a childhood tour to Storybrooke’s observatory as Virgo, but the game they’d started had become much more fun. She would pick out a seemingly random cluster of stars and Kieran would pull a story from thin air to support her newfound constellation. So far he’d incorrectly told a number of Greek and Roman myths that she’d learned in school, dubbing Achilles name in place of Icarus’ in a story flying too close to the sun, melting wings, and falling to the sea. Instead of drowning, he was also saved by a beautiful mermaid who fell in love with him. Lucy had snorted with laughter at the story, much to Kieran’s supposed discontent. However, she’d caught him observing her and smiling when he’d thought her gaze was turned back to the sky.

She’d catalogued this away, as she did with all the unexpectedly kind moments she experienced with him, attributing it to her eyes playing tricks on her. She knew she was simply grasping at straws, seeing what she wanted to see.

He chuckled low in his throat, “Demeter, the goddess of the harvest.”

“That one actually sounds half right,” She giggled, wrapping the cover blanket more tightly around her. She had a thick coat on beneath it but she still shivered, trying to keep herself warm as the temperature dipped lower by the hour.  
“That’s because it is,” He grinned, propping himself up on his elbow to face her. His other hand trailed down the side of her face. He rested it on her neck, fooling a bit with a lock of her hair.

She smacked his hand away, scoffing in annoyance at him. He withdrew it, resting it on the blanket between them. She tried her best to act satisfied to see it go, feigning her indifference with a haughty mask. “Do tell, oh jester.”

She can tell by the way he breathes in deeply and his eyes darken in that dangerous way that he has accepted her challenge. She can feel her heart racing excitedly as she waits for the story. “Demeter was the mother of the goddess Persephone. Her daughter was said to be the most beautiful creature on God’s earth, with glowing blonde hair and sparkling blue eyes. It is said that the girl, the epitome of all that was light and good, inspired love in all those who laid eyes upon her. And the devil himself was no different; he came upon the girl sitting in a meadow full of flowers and decided she was the most radiant of them all. And so Hades kidnapped the girl, pulling her back down to hell with him.” His eyes rested on her as he licked his lips in that half-evil, half-maddening way of his, his tongue catching at the corner of his mouth. She passed off the shiver that fell down her spine as one of cold rather than excitement.

“To make her Queen of the Underworld,” she murmured, her mitten-clad hands bringing the covers up to her neck.

  


He nodded simply, pulling her to him gently. Her shuddering stopped as she collided with the sudden warmth. “But a ray of light doesn’t belong to the darkness,” She bit her lip and stared up at him expectantly. “It needs the sun to grow, to nurture. And so Demeter’s crops died without this beautiful beacon of light to guide them, growing cold and dead as they lost the one thing they truly needed.” He didn’t say the word but she could hear it echoing in the silence, love. Without the love of her daughter, Demeter crumbled into a black-hearted wretch rather than a goddess, taking her vengeance out on the harvest people needed to live.

He was silent for a moment, studying her. She turned her head down, trying to slow her pulse down so he wouldn’t feel her blood rushing underneath his fingertips and to hide the blush creeping up on her cheeks. Usually when they laid together, it wasn’t like this. He might put his gaze upon her lips, but it would only be for a moment or two before capturing them with his own. It was lust that had driven them together mostly, tinged with a need to find someone who was so fundamentally unlike Charlie that there was no way for her heart to confuse them. And yet, she could feel her heartbeat drumming against her ribs, threatening to break through them if she didn’t find a way to catch her breath. It was the kind of emotion that her picture-perfect boyfriend of days past had never managed to stir in her, that no-one had besides him. It might be exhilarating if it hadn’t been so frightening.

“What about Hades though?” She asked abruptly, looking him straight in the eyes. He chuckled for a moment, before moving his hand deeper into her hair, fisting it and letting his fingers run down through the ends.

“What about him, sweetheart?” He said in a whisper, his breathe tickling her lips.

She flickered her eyes down for a moment sadly, before meeting his blue eyes. They were her favorite thing about Kieran but she seldom let herself look into them, what she saw there… There was a sadness, a darkness to their light color that was riddled with sharp edges and anger. “He loved her too,” She stated, leaning forward slowly and pressing a light kiss between his beautiful, painful eyes on the bridge of his nose.

He pulled away from her, rolling onto his back again and staring straight up at the stars in question. She felt colder than before, in that moment, a kind of chill that ran less through her body and stuck in her throat. She pretended that it wasn’t a bother and concentrated on his stony silence instead. He laid there, not speaking, for so long she thought he’d forgotten her presence completely. She was about to reach out and touch his arm when his words surprised her.

“He knew he could not keep her.” His words were quiet, almost scratchy. “Persephone was not the same from the moment she stepped into the underworld. She may have been immortal but she had spent so much time around her mother, around life, that she went through a change without it. She was still beautiful, but her light hair turned dark, almost black, because the sun was not there to kiss it with strands of gold. Her eyes were still the same beautiful blue but the fires of hell turned them fierce. Every time a new boat passed by her throne on the River Styx and she saw the people crying for their lives, her eyes became more cold and rabid, like a wolf in a cage. Hades wanted more anything to keep her, to make her his queen, but he could not, so he set her free.”

He rested his hand on the middle of his chest and laid back, closing his eyes tightly. Lucy could see his jaw clench as he fought with himself, trying to keep himself level-headed. She frowned, and before she could stop herself, she was unclasping his hands and tucking his arm around her, her face burrowed into his neck. She refused to look up at him, but she could feel his eyes on her.

“It took her a while, didn’t it?” She smiled as she wrapped her arm around him, making herself a bit more comfortable. “To come back to him, I mean. She waited nine months, three-quarters of a year it took her to realize that sunlight and fresh air and pure unadulterated joy are all wonderful things, but perhaps they are not enough to base an existence on. It’s not always an easy thing to realize that the love you know…a mother’s love, that is, is not the only love. It is not always the strongest one, the first one. Hades had loved her with a fire and a passion no other man had been able to, and it was hard to fathom. I think she realized it was because he had really loved all of her, even the painful parts, not just her mask of beauty and grace.”

She could feel his smile as he nuzzled against her hair. “I think they were wrong, the people who wrote down the myths. He didn’t give her the pomegranate, she made it herself. She was the daughter of the harvest and she grew a way back to her love, and she shaped it like a heart. Four chambers full of seeds as red as blood, one for every quarter of the year. And three can be eaten without consequence, but when she laid her mouth upon the fourth, she was returned to him.” She turned her head up, tracing her fingertips along his jaw. “There is love in the darkness as well, after all.”

“Maybe you’re right, princess,” Her heart seemed to skip at that word. He had called her lots of things before (love, sweetheart, darling, strumpet) but she had never heard that word fall from his lips before and yet, it felt so achingly familiar to her, even the inflection he said it with. Like she had heard it in another li-

“Perhaps we should make some love in the darkness as well,” And with that, his lips were on her neck and any words spoken from them forgotten. Instead, as he dropped them lower and carefully unbuttoned her pea coat, new sounds of pleasure began falling from her mouth instead. Yes, his little nicknames would have to wait until later.

**Author's Note:**

> I came up with Thorne for Aurora’s last name whilst watching Revenge, part of me want to use Emily for the first name because I could really see it fitting Sarah Bolger’s face. I eventually decided against it and went for Lucy meaning “Light” in French. I liked the juxtaposition with Kieran meaning “Dark” or “Little dark one” in Irish. Ping-mei “Peyton” Jong comes from a combination of a close friend’s name (Mei), Mulan’s film alias, and The Joy Luck Club. In the book, the character Waverly Jong is named Waverly Place Jong after the name of the street her parents live on, and so in this universe Mulan’s family would have been living on Peyton Place at the time of her birth. She also has three older brothers in Storybrooke who are not related to her in actuality but by the curse (much as in the case of Grace living with a separate family), Yao, Ling, and Chien-Po. Phillip becomes Charles after Charles Perrault, the writer of the original Sleeping Beauty. I attempted to be more original with him but I didn’t like any of the other names I tried. Couldn’t help myself with working the Hades/Persephone myth in there or the Peter Pan quote, I have an addiction.


End file.
